Nikita

Nikita; thriller, France / Italy, 1990; D: Luc Besson, S: Anne Parillaud, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tchéky Karyo, Marc Duret, Jean Reno

Nikita (19) is a nihilistic heroin addict who together with her friends robs a pharmacy in order to get some drugs. The police surrounds the building and kills everyone except Nikita. She is sentenced to a life in prison. After she gets some medicaments, she wakes up in one room where Bob, an agent of a secret service agency, offers her two choices: death or work as a hired assassin. Nikita chooses the latter, and after a long training starts performing the assassins. But after she finds a boyfriend and love, she gets sickened by violence and runs away from the agency.

Around director Luc Besson various conflicting opinions clashed with one another: for some, he was just an irritating, Hollywood-style author full of mannerisms, while for the others he was an artist full of aesthetic touch and style. His 4th film, "Nikita", that gained a huge commercial success in France and was even nominated for a Golden Globe as best foreign language film, is definitely inferior to his later movie about an assassin, "Leon", due to the unusual performance by actress Anne Parillaud, but as a whole it is a surprisingly well made film. The story at first shows Nikita as a brutal antagonist without heart (she stabs the hand of a cop with a pen; puts a living mouse in the box of a computer expert...) but starts to change confronted with the job of a killer so that in the quiet and understated open ending she actually becomes a positive character who rejects violence and awakens her feelings. Besson's direction leans too much towards the aesthetics, but he again has a wonderful visual style. 

Grade:++